Bird Watching at Pallikkaranai
Here are the photos taken during the outing
A plan was on to go for a bird watching trip to the Marsh Lands in Pallikkarani from CTC photography team. Though the birding season is over and almost all the migratory birds would have gone back, we nevertheless decided to go on for a bird watching.
For me, the day started as early as 4:00am. I was to be picked up from Guindy, which means that I will have to travel from Annanagar to Guindy. I was really surprised to know that during that time of the morning, the buses would be so jam packed from Koyambedu. Good that I dropped the idea of carrying a tripod.
Anyways, I reached Guindy by around 5:00am and called Hari, the organizer of the event. Meanwhile the others have already gathered at the Velachery MRTS station by around 5:30. Hari and me reached there by around 5:45am. Without wasting any further time, we distributed the fruits that Hari had brought along and start towards the marsh land. The entire place was thickly covered with smog. We were a bit surprised to see such thick smog during this time of the year. I was even wondering if there would be any dew at all, but later on it was confirmed that there was quite a lot of dew. See for yourself...
Hari, who had come there the previous week, was really shocked to see that the water had dried up quite a lot and there was only very little water left out. Now this has turned out to be a real marsh land. But we were not disappointed as to the availability of birds. We could immediately see that there were a few Egrets and Herons hoping around. We drove a bit further and took the road that connects Pallikkaranai and Pallavaram in which you can see the most of the marsh land. The stretch would be about 2 kms long. The marsh land extended quite far on both sides of the road.
Everyone parked their vehicles at the start of the road and started walking along the land. A few had brought some birding books which would help in identifying the birds and Hari also had brought a binocular for spotting distant birds.
While everyone were engrossed in watching birds and few attempting to watch bugs a flowers, your truly, notorious for catching people unawares, got into the candid camera business. Though it was not a major success, there were some funny catches!
We walked along the road and were able to spot quite a few birds, and of course some poochis (bugs / insects whatever) and photograph them too. Following is the list of birds that we were able to spot in the 2 to 3 hours of spending there.
Little Egret
Intermediate Egret
Cattle Egret
Indian Pond Heron
Purple Heron

Black Headed Ibis
Glossy Ibis
Black Winged Stilt
Spot Billed Pelican
Purple Swamphen
Plain Prinia
Ashy Prinia
Black Drongo
Rosy Starling
White Throated Kingfisher
Pheasant Tailed Jacana
Marsh Sandpiper
There could be more. I am still waiting for some the birders to update their findings.
After spending about 2 hours or so, and when the sum has started beating on us really hard, we decided to return back. We headed to the Velachery Ratna Café and had a good breakfast, before calling it a day.
Overall it was an interesting day with so many birds still hanging out in Chennai irrespective of the heat and the end of birding season.